“Alright,” he said. “I guess if we’re going to have a lot of time to kill with nothing to do, I might as well tell you the whole story.”
I nodded in encouragement and scooted just a little closer, so I could see his face clearer in the light from the fire. “Go ahead,” I told him, holding my breath for what he was going to tell me.
Cade
I had to swallow hard and take a deep breath before I started talking.
I would never have considered talking about this with anyone even two hours ago. It had been the nightmare that woke me up every night, the albatross hanging around my neck that made me rush into storage closets and bathrooms so I could cry behind a locked door in the middle of the day.
But talk about it?
Never.
And yet, somehow, after facing potential death and now being trapped in a situation that was still dangerous as hell…
Somehow, sitting next to Aiden with his easy smile and his open nature, I felt like talking. Even though the wound was still raw, after all these months, I found myself genuinely wanting to tell him everything.
To receive the comfort and protection that he was so obviously offering me.
“Brody was my boyfriend,” I said, both of the b-words tasting like poison on my tongue. I curled in on myself a little, hugging my arms around my knees. Just saying those words left me with a pit in my stomach, an awful sinking feeling that wouldn’t stop. “I trusted him.”
“Oh, hell, no,” Aiden said, and I looked at him to see his eyebrows raised high. “I don’t like the way this is going. I think I might be about to want to punch a guy.”
I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t bring myself to it. “I met him when I came up to visit Caleb – he goes to your college. I thought we were really special, you know? That we had something. I thought we would end up spending the rest of our lives together. But I found out he was… he was cheating on me.”
Aiden sucked in a breath through his teeth. “I knew it,” he hissed. “I want to punch him.”
“Not just once,” I added, needing to share all of it, to tell him how bad it had really been. “It turned out he’d been cheating on me the whole time we were together. Going out and having one night stands – even sometimes without protection. I never knew because we were apart for so long between visits.”
“He didn’t – uh…” Aiden said, his expression flashing alarm.
“No, he didn’t infect me with anything,” I said. I sighed morosely. “I got a full health screen as soon as I found out. I was lucky, somehow. He could have given me everything under the sun and I wouldn’t have known until I caught him in bed with someone else.”
“Shit.” Aiden sniffed and shook his head. “Honestly. You need a bunch of football players to team up and scare the shit out of this idiot, you just say the word. We’ll have your back.”
I managed to find it in myself to smile. “No, I don’t think that’s necessary,” I said. “Anyway, it’s… it was a few months back, now. I should be getting over it.”
Aiden shrugged. “Grief is grief, man. However long it takes is how long it takes. You don’t have to follow anyone else’s schedule.”
“Grief,” I repeated, wondering. I’d never thought about that word before. Was that what I was experiencing?
“Yeah,” Aiden said. “You lost the life you thought you were going to have. That’s tough.”
“I never looked at it that way before,” I said. He was right. Iwasgrieving. I looked at him sharply. “Caleb did tell me you always say the wrong thing.”
Aiden blinked. “Ouch. But, yeah. Guilty.”
“Well, you should start acting like it, then, because I think that was exactly the right thing I needed to hear,” I said.
Aiden grinned like I’d just made his whole week.
I chuckled and looked to the front again, but that only brought my attention to the fact that it was the middle of the day – and yet we were sitting by a campfire in the dark sharing ghost stories. “What are we going to do?” I asked, and I hoped he knew that I meant about the snow-in.
“I don’t know,” Aiden said truthfully. He glanced at the windows, at the coating of white that we could still see from here. “You know, we’re really lucky the snow didn’t just sweep us away. Or that the air pressure didn’t blast the cabin to pieces.”
“Right,” I said. “Great.”
He must have picked up the sarcasm in my tone because he gave me a guilty look. “Sorry. Just trying to see it from a positive point of view. We’re still alive, and that’s pretty special, so I’m trying to hang onto that.”
